Open Source at SF State University - Sugar

OLPC-SF April '09 meeting: Where do we go from here?

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:25:52 -0700

What: OLPC-SF April 2009 meeting

OLPC-SF will meet on April 11, 2009. Items on the agenda:

Meet and greet - 10:00 am to 10:30 am
Education: Starr King Elementary...
Technology: Fit-PC as a school server, and plasticized active antenna (going to Maroantsetra, Madagascar), Moodle advances, OLPC-SF Repair Center car chargers, new and interesting activities...

Tutorius - the tutorial creating machine

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:17:13 -0700

I just came across Tutorius, an application for creating tutorials in Sugar. From their website:

Tutorius is an open source project by 9 students from Sherbrooke University in Quebec, Canada with the goals of creating an interactive tutor based on the Sugar platform and of making the Sugar platform more accessible to schools, teachers and children around the world.

It goes on to say:

Even though Sugar already made a huge step in making learning easier and more accessible to young children, some important improvements can still be made. Discovery, sharing and collaboration are at the core of the Sugar platform, but there is a need to better structure the way students are going to explore and learn. This is what Tutorius is all about: providing an extra layer on top of the existing learning software to guide the students and structure the way they are going to learn using it. The goal is definitively not to limit the children in their exploration and learning, it is to make it easier for them to do so by giving them the right tools and support.

OLPC-SF March '09 meeting: community projects, schools, hardware hacks and more!

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:32:10 -0700

What: OLPC-SF March 2009 meeting

OLPC-SF will meet on March 14, 2009. Items on the agenda:

Meet and greet - 10:00 am to 10:30 am
Updates - Repair, Projects, Ideas, Sugar-on-a-stick, VoIP - 10:30 am to 11:00 am
KIDcomp - 11:00 am to 11:30 am
Starr King update - 11:30 to 12:00 noon
A local Montessori, and Elementary Education program at SF State. - 12:00 noon top 12:30 pm
School server with the latest stable build (XS-0.5.2). - 12:30pm to 1:00pm
Bring your XOs for the usual software upgrades (build 767 aka release 8.2) if you haven't already done so. - 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm

OLPC-SF February '09 meeting notes

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:13:05 -0700

This meeting was quite interesting. We had a good bit of variety. We had new members, a local school showed up with a boatload of XOs (22 to be exact), some old-fashioned re-flashing of XOs, a visitor from Madagascar, and three very bored children. Here are the details:

OLPC-SF and a model

No, not that kind of a model. A diagrammy model of how things should be all connected together in a perfect universe - Education, Technology, Outreach. Very prescriptive. Its based on how things have happened in the past and how the group can possibly grow. It also proved to be a good way to introduce the group to the two attendees from a local school. The mindmap is done in Freemind and can be expanded/improved upon. Freemind file is attached below.

Remixing fun with InfoSlicer

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:06:38 -0800

Some time ago, Anne Gentle announced InfoSlicer. This is a tool that would be used typically on OLPC XO's Sugar environment (or any other computer running Sugar). InfoSlicer is a very interesting GPLv2 based project. Its somewhat like Siftables, which allows one to freely create, mix and match, remix and generate new things. Very generative in its approach. InfoSlicer has two to three panes depending on what one is doing. One pulls content from Wikipedia, adds his own material, removes some of it, adds pictures, reshuffles, and publishes the material. In case of the XO I am using, this material is automatically made available on the Table of Contents list on the default Browse page.